Ding and Dent Production Builds - SEN

Ding and Dent Production Builds - SEN

DD-09039

Description: It’s that time of year when we sell off our production scrap. These boards do not work, but they make for great practice, and if you’re good with the tools, you might even salvage some serious dough. These boards are a great way to encourage hot-air rework, scoring usable parts, and not having to fret if the rework goes poorly.

The production scrap is divided up into the applicable store front category. It’s a surprise! You might get any failed product within that category. This product is for an item from the Sensor Category.

Defects range from incorrect designs, PCB defects, incorrectly assembled boards, bad parts, bad soldering, blemishes, or anything that would make the SparkFun product not able to be sold on our store front.

Units come in single pieces and there in no guarantee as to what you will be receiving, but we can guarantee that you will not receive a blank PCB!

We cannot accept requests, returns, exchanges, provide documentation, or provide support on any aspect of these boards.

Customer Comments

It’s rainy weather (I live in the Netherlands)… Mailman arives with a little red box…
The box contains the IR sensor and the “Ding or Dent” I ordered.
I got a ITG3200 breakoutboard! (Still have to test it)
Little red boxes, great for rainy days, even better in sunshine!

I did this already, I also feel like people should know what they are getting when they order this product. Weather it be working or not. The photo needs to be updated to a box smaller than a mouse with one chip in it. That is what you are paying for that is what the image should be.

EDIT: I have taken steps with BBB to resolve this issue and hopefully to prevent this issue again. No response to my support Email yet.

Edit#2: Apparently they sent out the rest of my order today. Also the representative claims they “Try to make it clear” that the product you will get is in single pieces. From a company dealing with electronics, one would hope they would see how silly that sounds when referencing this page. BBB claim still stands and will be updated with this information. If you are selling a small box that “Should” have three pieces in it and state on the page that it’s sold in single pieces there is a problem. I will be happy when I see that mountain of random sensors removed from the product page and a small box with 1,2,or 3 chips inside replacing it.

I have ordered many dings and dents from Sparkfun before and have never had an issue. The description also clearly states that they come in single pieces. As for the purchasing 3 and getting 1, that hasn’t happened to me, but CS is very helpful with things like that.

Received an accelerometer breakout, it seems to be working, each axis changes on my multimeter when I shake it in that direction. The Z resting voltage is 0.2V off, and the X and Y about 0.05V, so not very accurate, but it appears to work!

Ordered two Sunday. Received them today (Friday). One board was a MPR121 Capacitive Touch Sensor breakout. Visually, it seems fine. Checking with my DMM, I read ~6.5 ohms resistance between the 3.3V pad and the GND pad (shorted cap, it looks like). My board says “V13” on it where the newest ones has a date.

The second is a Nine Degrees of Freedom board. Visually, it looks like it was almost cut in two. Probing around on my DMM only revealed one broken trace. Not bad; just add wire and solder. I might make the MPR121 a college project for troubleshooting.

I got one of the 9DOF RAZORs as well! All I had to do was remove and re-solder the magnetometer and I have a fully functional board for $5! Crap! That $5 is going to turn into who knows how much more once I decide what to use it for. ;)

This was my first “Ding and Dent” purchase and I was a little nervous about what I would get.
The box I received basically contained awesome in a static bag. I now have weeks of experimenting and fun ahead of me.

But why couldn’t you let that Geiger dev-board go with the tube still on it???? :P

Ordered 4. Got 2 9dof sensor sticks(fixed one, but it was a 3-hour battle to find two shorted pins on the gyro that were tying SCL and SDA together). The other seems two have a bad chip, SCL cant be pulled high, even with 800 ohms to 3V3. Also got a HMC5883L(worked out of the box) and a Color Light Sensor Evaluation Board (was the P&P machine drunk when it placed the sensor? Hopeless). $100+ for $5! Wow!

I am hoping for an “n” degrees of freedom board that only reports “n-1”; a little bird told me that is one of the most common things in “bad” sensors…
Your little bird must be pretty accurate, that’s almost exactly what I got! I received a 5 DoF board, hooked it up to an oscilloscope, and discovered that 4 DoFs work - I get nice clear signals for X, Y, X-rotation and Y-rotation. Even Z (which I assume is the broken one based on comparing its waveform to X and Y) still kinda works - it’s just very very fuzzy instead of nice and smooth like its siblings.
Now all I need to do is order more stuff in order to make something neat with it - that’s how they get you I guess :)
Edit: Chuh this was supposed to be in reply to arbarnhart up there as indicated, it seems that got lost when I previewed the post?

I just received my shipment and I got a dual axis IDG500 breakout board. Wow, $40 for $5. First inspection shows no physical damage except a tine insignificant scratch to the board, nothing even close to serious. I hope that’s all the damage.

These are awesome! I got 2 9dof Razor IMU boards, and one of them works perfectly after I changed the fuse bits and re-flashed it. The other one had shorts under the accelerometer and magnetometer, but I cut those off and have a working 3-axis gyro board (again had to fix fuses and reprogram). I also got 2 5dof sensor boards. One was missing the gyro, but the accelerometer works, and the other one appears to be totally fine. I did get a couple other worthless boards….but I’m very happy with rest!

and me; this is the roulette table where you can play the rest of your chips on red (you have to spend the whole credit on one purchase). I ordered 3. I am hoping for an “n” degrees of freedom board that only reports “n-1”; a little bird told me that is one of the most common things in “bad” sensors…

Wooohoooo! I wish that I had ordered 10 the first time to get the price break: these boards came with pretty much all the parts I was looking for (many dof + gps parts).
One part I think I’ve diagnosed so far: Venus GPS board with an unpopulated SMA connection. The fact that it was unpopulated means (to me) that they probably never tested if the chip could get a gps lock or not. Looking at the board, I think that it was a bummer pcb layout: mine’s dated 03/18/09, whereas the Eagle files and the pictures for the current product are dated 04/27/09 (v15). The only difference I can spot so far is that the 3.3V on mine is connect underneath the chip to the VBAT line, rendering VBAT kind of useless. In the current model this is fixed by connecting them with a jumper. I don’t think I mind this, it just means that you can’t have a hot start (it’s either all on (30sec TTFF) or all off). Can you confirm/note any other problems? If it’s just a small annoyance like that, I’ve got a gps! :)
UPDATE: YES!!!! It works, simply cannot have a “hot start” as mentioned above (because it’s an old PCB design). :) That’s okay, TTFF was about 40sec the first time, beautifully accurate NMEA data streamed out. I had to solder on the RP-SMA connector, and buy a GPS antenna, but this thing is awesome, especially for $5!!

Awesomesauce. I threw in my $5 on a whim, hoping it would be something at least worthy of tuning into a wall ornament. ;-)
I was definitely not expecting a high altitude sensing board! It powers up just fine, and interacting with it via serial suggests that at least a few of the sensors are just fine (apparently, I need to run my humidifier a little more). :)
Awesome. You guys just made my day.

I ordered one of these not too long ago. I received a ‘failed’ IDG300 2-axis Gyro Breakout. The only thing wrong with it visually is that the IC is labeled IDG3000 while the silk on the board says IDG300.
Just for a laugh I hooked it up to an Arduino to see what was wrong with it, and to my surprise it actually worked. Gave it spin on both the x and y axis'(axes?!) and the analog value went up and down as expected.
I lucked out and am quite happy.

Customer Reviews

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